


The Federation's Children (meta)

by aralias



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-25
Updated: 2014-10-25
Packaged: 2018-05-13 00:08:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5686948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aralias/pseuds/aralias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kids in the B7 'Verse: the Doylian explanation for never seeing them is that kid actors are a hassle. Watsonianly, what can be deduced about Federation families?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Federation's Children (meta)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [executrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/gifts).



> I wrote this for Blakefest. Originally posted: http://aralias.dreamwidth.org/2005815.html#cutid1

Most of what we know about life in the Federation comes from the first episode of _Blake's 7_. The universe expands in multiple directions afterwards (for example, we learn about other planets, we learn about things like Central Control, etc. Even Space Command and the Supreme Commander aren't introduced until episode 6). But episode 1 is one of only three episodes of B7 set on Earth (the others being Pressure Point and Rumours of Death). More importantly it's the only one in which our heroes are shown to be actually living in the world of the Federation. In the other episodes they're just passing through - they have other more important things to worry about than the mundanities of daily life. Interestingly, I don’t believe that anyone who had failed to catch the first episode would have any difficulty in believing that the Federation was evil and that Blake needed to fight it, but it would be a different sort of evil. Anyway - different essay. 

Almost everything that we know about children in the Federation also comes from episode 1. Again, this makes sense, although it is slightly strange that our heroes hardly mention their childhoods at all from this point onwards. Blake can be excused because he may or may not remember anything about his childhood (though personally I believe he remembers it all). As Blake is predominantly our viewpoint character for series 1 and 2, this probably explains some of it. The rest can probably be explained by looking at the kind of people our heroes are. Even the most gregarious of the crew (i.e. Vila and Dayna) aren't entirely easy with the others. There's a moment in Children of Auron in which Dayna gives Vila (who has known Cally for three series) a pretty basic piece of information about Cally i.e. that Cally is a clone. This infodump is obviously for the audience's benefit (what should be an ‘as you know Bob’ by any other name), but the fact that Vila genuinely does not know this information suggests that there has never been much chatting on the Liberator about times past. Vila himself only offers the information that he bought his Delta grade from a friend in series 3 (Volcano) – and he must have had plenty of provocation to reveal it before then, since he’s been living with know-it-alls like Blake and Avon and Tarrant for some time. 

I admit that what I’m doing here is offering excuses for the relative brevity of what will follow, but I’m also suggesting that there are reasons why childhood isn’t mentioned much in _Blake’s 7_ that have nothing to do with those experiences being painful or repressed. As for why we don’t see other children: well, the places that Blake and co (later Avon and co) visit are largely workplaces. I wouldn’t expect to see children in Space Command HQ or during the siege on Albion. I might not be _surprised_ to see them in Gola’s tent or aboard the _Space Princess_ , but I’m equally not too surprised that they aren’t there. Nobody wants a lot of annoying brats shouting and ruining the atmosphere on their drugged pleasure-cruise, do they? And Gola was unmarried and presumably didn’t want other people’s kids hanging around and taking up his fool’s time. There are none in the Dome corridors in The Way Back when Blake sneaks out to his ‘first’ secret meeting, which might imply a curfew. But it might not. 

Anyway. Enough of why we don’t know more – here’s what I think we do know.

**Family Ties**  
Despite there being no on-screen evidence of their presence around adult characters, I believe that higher-grade children are raised with their immediate family and are consequently able to form attachments. Blake has strong emotional ties to his siblings (Way Back), as do Tarrant (Death Watch) and Avon (Space Fall). Jenna has similar ties to her mother (Space Fall). Dayna obviously lives with her father in non-usual circumstances (Aftermath), but it is worth noting that he was able to spirit her away while she was a baby, so he must have had access to her. I will mention this again later on as well, but it is also worth noting that the revolution that Hal Mellanby led and which caused his exile was comprised of entire families (Aftermath). So – resistors brought their children along to their resistance meetings/acts of civil disobedience.

Maryatt has pictures of a wife and two children on him when his body is discovered (Deliverance), which doesn’t necessarily imply they all live together, but does suggest his children are important to him. In a sterile environment like the Federation this shouldn’t be taken for granted, but does seem to be the case. Even Servalan is anxious to reproduce (Children of Auron) and feels a strong maternal instinct towards her unborn children. Again and again, people (Federation citizens and the soon-to-be colonised) are shown to be worried about what will happen to their families as a result of their actions (Mandrian - Mission to Destiny, Arrian - Countdown), or are living in the aftermath of their families being punished for their actions (Blake – Space Fall, Maryatt – Deliverance). I’ll return to this theme in the third section, but it almost makes me wonder whether the Federation allows or even encourages its citizens to form family bonds so that it can threaten those families in order to keep citizens in-line. 

It is also worth noting here that Blake’s (presumably) Alpha parents were allowed to have three children, which is quite a few. So there may well be no limit (for Alphas at least) on the number of children you’re allowed to have. 

There is no evidence from the only confirmed member of the lower grades (Vila) that he was raised with a family, but there’s no evidence that he wasn’t, either. 

**School, Grades and Career-Path**  
Children definitely attend school (Way Back) and it’s important enough to society that their attendance is monitored by a central registry (Way Back). Since attendance has to be monitored, it suggests that there is some way that children might not attend school i.e. they aren’t in a boarding-school type environment where they’re there all the time. This is further evidence for my ‘children raised with their families’ argument (above). 

No further information is available about subjects or other matters concerning schooling. Blake “did study some natural history” (Bounty), but whether this was at school or later at university is not at all clear. I would suggest that it’s not a general subject that everyone in the Federation has studied though, as Sarkoff (who has associated with Federation citizens, including troopers and the – presumably high grade - base commander) seems surprised at Blake’s knowledge/Blake doesn’t take the ‘historian’ comment as a sarcastic joke. So perhaps we can rule out ‘natural history’ as a typical school subject. 

In ‘Volcano’ (as I’ve already mentioned), Vila claims to have bought his classification ('grade four ignorant', likely to correspond to Delta, which is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet) from a “friend at the testing centre”. Obviously it is possible to have friends who are much older than you are, but generally the term implies a peer, so it’s likely Vila was graded at a time when his peers already had jobs at places like “the testing centre” i.e. it’s likely he was not a child when this happened. That said, he also says that he grew up among “the Delta service grades” (Shadow), suggesting that there was some degree of pre-determination. 

Alternately, to counter my earlier argument, it is possible that Vila’s friend in the testing centre may not be very old. Tarrant is very young in series 3 and is already a Space Captain when we meet him. This implies that he (and presumably Servalan) got drafted into the military very early and were given jobs very early. Meanwhile in the rebellion, Veron (who is referred to as a ‘child’ several times, though the actress is about 22) is already working for the military (Pressure Point). At the end of the episode, she’s left on Earth with the assumption that she will now lead the rebellion in her mother’s place.

In that same scene from Volcano, Vila explicitly links grade (explicitly linked to intelligence here and in ‘Weapon’) to job prospects. If he had been assigned a better grade then he might well have become a Space Captain, like Tarrant. Servalan (who we can assume is a high grade, given that she becomes president) was initially a cadet, a step on a career path that led to her becoming Supreme Commander of the military. Coser was assigned a beta grade and became a technician (Weapon), but not a high-ranking one (he had many superiors and was not expected to invent anything interesting). Blake, our only confirmed Alpha, worked as an engineer of some kind (according to the novelisation and fan-convention). He certainly worked on the Aquitar project (Cygnus Alpha) in some sort of role that probably wasn’t military, given his (implied) knowledge of the technology that comprises the teleport bracelet. 

**Crime and Children**  
I’ve already talked briefly about the dangers of being the child of a criminal, but let’s reiterate them quickly here. If someone deserted from Space Command, then their family go into slavery on one of the frontier worlds (Deliverance). Blake’s family were similarly killed as a punishment for his rebellion (Way Back). Hal Mellanby led a revolt that seems to have been violent, and, despite an attempt at honourable surrender, “the security forces massacred [all of his followers], men, women, and children” (Aftermath). 

Of course, children themselves can commit crimes. Vila talks of having been kept in “juvenile detention wards” (Shadow). This is probably the same place as he later refers to as the "academy" he had to escape from (Power), in which case it’s called ‘CF 1.’ It seems likely that even the lower-grade children were assigned to these places to be re-educated and returned to society (Vila’s head has been adjusted many times – Way Back), rather than being deported or killed. This analysis fits with Vila’s description of CF 1 as an academy (place of education) and with the word ‘wards’ (which suggests a hospital/the ’treatments’ that Blake was given). There’s no mention of children being deported, except for the crimes of their parents, and I would argue (based on Blake’s trial) that deportation is the worst punishment the Federation ‘officially’ has. Obviously unofficially they’re perfectly happy to “eliminate” (read, murder) you. 

Children can also, obviously, be the victim of crime. Interestingly, perhaps as a direct result of the bonds I referred to above, crimes against children are amongst the most serious it is possible to commit. Blake’s specific charges (“assaults on minors, attempting to corrupt minors”) are given a “category 9 rating, and as such are adjudged most grave” (Way Back). To put this in perspective, the only other category of crime we are told about is going outside the dome, which is a “category 4 crime”. I assume this is less grievous than a category 9 crime, since the words ‘most grave’ are used for 9. My supposition is held up by ‘Hostage’ (Ushton is apparently a “grade four [offender], allowed visitors, special privileges, that sort of thing”) and the novelisation (which I should probably refer to more, if I am going to refer to it at all, but which is not going to appear again). In the novel (based on early drafts of the script so reasonably reliable from an authorial-intent POV), Dal Ritchie tells Blake that “Going outside the Dome is a Category Six [seemingly later changed to four] crime. If you’re caught there’ll be punishments and special treatments. It’ll go on your record – and that’ll mean however good you are in your job you’ll never get promoted to a senior echelon.” Child molesting is therefore seen as worse than going outside the Dome – which is something that presumably only resisters would ever do, so you’d think it would be highly frowned up! Blake is sentenced to deportation (essentially life imprisonment) for his supposed crimes, which is roughly similar to our contemporary sentence, which seems to be 10 years to life. 

**Conclusion**  
Aside from a few weird ‘sold into slavery for your father’s desertion’-type stuff, it seems children in the Federation live in approximately the same way that children in 1970s Britain did. I have no real evidence for it, but I sort of assume that Blake, at least, (part of “a highly privileged group”,) had quite a happy childhood and early adolescence. He was certainly allowed to visit his uncle and cousin on their penal colony (hooray) and spent some considerable time there – presumably not doing work, but simply visiting family and bonding with Inga. He was (eventually) allowed to learn things like natural history, which he seems to take pleasure in. 

I would suggest that fact that Federation children are treated similarly to 1970s children is probably because, after their use as victims of Blake's fake-crime, children are never again relevant to the plot of the show. Consequently, nobody on the writing-team really bothered to think about them very carefully. Blake has a brother and sister because it seemed like a good idea at the time, rather than because Terry had thoroughly thought out the Federation’s policy on population control. Blake knows and cares about his family so that he has someone for the Federation to have killed – it’s an easy short cut for the audience, so they understand why he’s upset and how bad the Federation is. 

The reason nobody really thought very hard about children is (as the prompt correctly points out) because nobody wanted to put children in _Blake’s 7_. Not only are children generally bad at acting, but also the B7 universe is no place for a child (you’ll just end up getting mind-wiped and believing you were raped by the hero of the revolution). Despite what the annuals suggest, I doubt the makers of the television show thought B7 would appeal to children, and so child-viewers wouldn’t need an identification figure at any point. 

In short – you can do almost anything you like with the childhood recollections of our heroes because there’s not much to go on. But one thing I do know is that you won’t fool the children of the revolution – unless you drug and mindwipe them.


End file.
